Sergio

Baghdad, August 2003. The Canal Hotel, the United Nations headquarters in Iraq, is bombed, and under the rubble lies Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the UN's best known diplomats. The film takes those few hours of rescue as its spine and threads the man's life through it: Cambodia, Bosnia, East Timor and finally Iraq. The real question is personal rather than diplomatic. Sergio was someone who chose, on every front, to talk to the other side, war criminals included, and someone else paid for that each time. Why he agreed to go to Baghdad is laid out plainly. Greg Barker directed. Wagner Moura plays Sergio and Ana de Armas plays the economist Carolina Larriera. Netflix produced. Barker had already made a documentary on the same subject in 2009, and this fiction version can be read as a continuation of that work. The rubble scenes are the strongest thing in it: the American soldiers have no proper rescue equipment, and that detail gathers the film's whole critique into one image. Who it is for: anyone interested in political biography drawn from real events and in how the UN works. Who it is not for: anyone expecting political analysis. The film gives a lot of room to the love story, the flashbacks are scattered, and Iraqis are barely present.